mdhslibrarydept

In July of 1921, four men in a Ford Model T pulled up to survey a small riverside clearing in the Patapsco Forest Reserve. At the site, men in neckties and women in white dresses were clearing the ground and pitching tents. As Joel and Albert Hutzler stepped out of the Model T, they saw [...]

Almost one hundred years ago, the world famous magician Harry Houdini dazzled a crowd of 50,000 with one of his signature death-defying escape acts. On April 26, 1916, Houdini freed himself from a straitjacket as he dangled upside down, sixty feet above the sidewalk from a cornice of The Sun building in Baltimore. City police [...]

With St. Patrick’s Day approaching we thought it would be appropriate to feature three of the more beautiful and intriguing prints from our collection produced by John Hagerty, a Baltimore printer and the son of Irish immigrants: The Tree of Life, Hieroglyphicks of a Christian, and Hieroglyphicks of the Natural Man. More selfishly I was [...]

Working at the Maryland Historical Society, you get to see some pretty amazing things on a daily basis. From Francis Scott Key’s original draft of the Star Spangled Banner, early copies of the Declaration of Independence, and some of the first daguerreotypes of Baltimore harbor, to more recent gems like Eubie Blake’s collection of sheet [...]

This Saturday night, the Young Defenders of the Maryland Historical Society will be hosting its second annual Bootlegger’s Bash party at the 1840s Plaza at 29 S. Front Street, the site of the old Peale Museum. In anticipation of this popular fundraiser we have decided to share a selection of photographs, documents, and ephemera of [...]

In this Valentine’s Day poem, Cupid promises the holiday’s namesake patron, St. Valentine, that he will search high and low for a most worthy maid to strike with his arrows of love. He comes upon Baltimore City, “Which though for a City ‘tis somewhat slow…Is renowned for its maidens fair,” where he discovers the incomparable Nannie [...]

Over the 200 years since the death of Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806), his story has become a muddled combination of fact, inference, misinformation, hyperbole, and legend. Like many other figures throughout history, the small amount of surviving source material has nurtured the development of a degree of mythology surrounding his story. While myths make for great [...]

In 1976, Maryland Institute College of Art photography professor Linda G. Rich, and two of her students, Joan Clark Netherwood and Elinor B. Cahn, began work on a project documenting the large swath of neighborhoods collectively known as East Baltimore. What was intended to be merely a project for Rich’s class on social documentary photography, [...]

If you are fortunate enough to live or work in Mount Vernon, you’ve probably noticed the barricades that recently went up around the Washington Monument. The Baltimore Sun has been covering the project for months, and surprise!, there has been no lack of controversy regarding overall restoration of Mount Vernon Place. City Parks and Rec, at [...]

Several days after Benjamin and Kitty Cohen hosted their glamorous party, James Macon Nicholson (1807-1975) dutifully fulfilled his promise to send an account of the event to his mother at Wye House.(1) Too ill to attend, Rebecca Lloyd Nicholson apparently longed for every detail, but her son found his memory “considerably at a loss.” Nicholson [...]